In a passing nod to the trouble experienced by the Transport Department, finance minister Trevor Manuel this afternoon announced a revolution in the way South Africans file their tax returns, promising the IT needed to do so was in place and stable.
"We will ensure the back office is in place, that the system is tested and doesn`t collapse on the day it is switched on," he said in an address to business leaders, South African Revenue Service (SARS) staff and journalists at the tax collectors` Megawatt Park offices, in Sunninghill, Johannesburg.
Today`s announcement marks the start of a three-year process of innovation that will introduce a number of improvements to services for South African taxpayers, SARS said in a statement this morning.
Moving taxpayers to the "e-side"
Manuel says the country now has seven million registered taxpayers (out of a population of 45 million) and the number is increasing at a rate of about 8% a year.
"This volume growth places a tremendous strain on the current capacity and is challenging the service level promised in the SARS service charter," he explains. This will translate into 20 million items of post a year by 2010, eight million visits by taxpayers to SARS offices nationwide, nine million calls to the SARS contact centre and 18 million processing actions.
"The scale is just impossible," Manuel says, who was also told by SARS Commissioner Pravin Gordhan the taxman now has over half a billion documents in its storerooms - and the floors of some tax offices are cracking under the weight.
The finance minister says the deadline for tax returns is moving to 31 October, also known as Halloween. Whether this bodes ill, as did the launching of eNatis on a Friday the 13th, remains to be seen and could be a discussion point for the superstitious.
The form most taxpayers will fill in, IT12S (S for standard or simple) is downloadable from the SARS e-filing Web site and can be completed on the site or by using Adobe Acrobat Reader 8, which SARS is making available free of charge.
The return can also be e-mailed, hand delivered to SARS or posted, although only e-filers will be eligible for a raft of benefits. The form also contains a 2D barcode that allows for the fast and accurate reading of the data captured into the SARS database. Forms filled in by hand will be scanned into the system and intelligent character recognition tools are being installed to remove the human factor.
Hi-tech to end high jinks
Gordhan says technology and automation will allow his staff to concentrate on those South Africans not keen to pay their taxes. Algorithms are under development to scan the taxpayer database and individual records for patterns that point to tax evasion and better data-mining tools, as well as the increased use of third-party data to verify tax returns. This means that from this year tax payers no longer have to supply SARS with an IRP5 or any other receipts.
However, these have to be kept for five years. "That is why we are comfortable with you keeping the documents. When we pick up a discrepancy, we will pay you a visit."
Manuel alluded to SARS taking responsibility for the new social security tax, announced at the start of the year to provide all South Africans a pension. In addition, to the five million pay-as-you-earners on the system, Gordhan expects SARS to have to open and keep accurate files on another six million South Africans who will be required to pay the tax. "We will make sure, over the next three years, that we have the capacity to handle this," Gordhan says.
Related stories:
Busy year ahead for IT
Successful e-govt needs solid data foundation
SARS scraps another R1.5bn tender
SARS scraps R1.5b tender
SARS denies tender shake-up
SARS tender process grinds to a halt
SARS to award multibillion-rand tenders
SARS tender sparks international interest
Share